Thursday, November 1, 2007

The default location of your Desktop folder is ~/Desktop. You might prefer another location. If you by accident deleted the Dekstop folder, it will be stuck in your Trash folder as you can't put it back. These two steps enable you to change or restore your desktop folder:

gedit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirskillall nautilus

In step 1 look for this entry: XDG_DESKTOP_DIR. Make it like this: XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"Instead of step 2 you might also log off and log in again.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

"Pymedia is a Python library for accessing and manipulating media files. It makes audio and video playback/creation a snap for even a newcomer to programming." There is a deb installer available for pymedia 1.3.5 but not for 1.3.7 So I decided to write this howto.

Monday, October 22, 2007

The latest version of SPE 0.8.4.b works very well in Ubuntu Gutsy. It is available through subversion. However the repository package is outdated, as it is still on 0.8.2.a What SPE needs to solve this issue is a Debian packager with love for python. This is the related bug on launchpad, from which I quote Scott:"Ubuntu gets this package from Debian and it appears that it's been orphaned in Debian.(...) it'd be hugely helpful if someone concerned about spe would adopt it in Debian. There is a Debian Python Applications Team with active DD support, so you need not be a DD to do this."If you are not a packager it would be nice if you leave your comment on the launchpad bug. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/spe/+bug/124896So this gets more attention and will be fixed sooner as there is more demand. If someone steps up to package this for debian, I will release a new version of SPE.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

...all landed in subversion (rev255). wxGlade and XRCed are taken from their repositories, so they might be bleeding edge. Thanks to Diaa Sami some issues on Windows are fixed (eg running files with spaces). Check out the new SPE in the usual way:

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The last version of WinPdb debugger 1.0.9 has hit the SPE 0.8.4 subversion repository. What is now especially nice is that when you debug a python file from SPE, WinPdb remembers it when you have to relaunch the script. In case you don't know WinPdb:

Winpdb is a GPL python debugger, with support for smart breakpoints, multiple threads, namespace modification, embedded debugging, password encrypted communication and speed of up to 20 times that of pdb.

What I like especially about WinPdb, is that it is perfect for gui debugging as it supports multiple threads, that you can change variables on the fly (with exec variable=new_value in the shell) and... the amazing speed for a debugger. It almost runs programs at normal speed. SPE gives you the option to start running a program normally and to let WinPdb break in from the moment you want to debug. WinPdb has been fixed for Ubuntu and Mac, so now it is the best open source python debugger for Linux, Mac and Windows.

These are all the changes of 1.0.9:

Bug fix of bug 1654010 - window gets bigger on every session.

Bug fix of bug 1373074 - 2 Window menus on mac.

Bug fix of bug 1654011 - clipping long path names at the left.

Bug fix of bug 1654009 - List indices are sorted wrong.

Bug fix of bug 1610393 - Problems with wx-2.7.2-msw-unicode.

Bug fix of bug 1481097 - "# -*- coding: " problem.

+ fixes for tons of unreported bugs.

Feature request 1654155 - More compact variable list on OS X.

Feature request 1446799 - Restarting.

Feature request 1364935 - remember command line file.

In the latest release of SPE 0.8.3.c shipped with Winpdb 1.0.6 , so the changes of WinPdb might interest you as well:

Bug fix of bug 1358842 - Wrong terminal command in RHEL4.

Bug fix of bug 1559668 - not work with Ubuntu Dapper 6.06.

Bug fix of bug 1476311 - script launch fails with gnome-terminal.

Bug fix of bug 1492500 - Filtering should work anywhere.

Bug fix of bug 1445514 - Doesn't work with *.pyw scripts.

Bug fix of bug 1491470 - Slightly difficult to use a custom terminal in rpdb2.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

I've been working a lot on fixing SPE and upgrading it with the latest plugins. The winpdb debugger no longer fails and wxGlade crashes are history. Is that not great? Are you eager to try it out yourself? Please do! Get it from subversion and test it for any critical bug, so I can iron it out. I have been patching a lot for Ubuntu users, who will be very pleased with this release, and I'd like to thank Jurjen a lot for his work on Mac issues. This is a definitely a release everyone should upgrade to, wether you use windows, mac or linux!

Here is an overview what has been done:

The focus in this release is bugfixing, plugin upgrades and compatibility with wxPython 2.8, but it also still works on wxPython 2.6

Monday, March 5, 2007

I posted on the pyxides mailing list a prototype of a 'fold explorer'. A fold explorer is different from a class explorer as it shows the folding hierarchy of a document as a tree. Why? The aim is to use the internal power of Scintilla as much as possible. Scintilla supports 78 languages and a lot of them with folding. So the fold explorer enables any scintilla based editor to immediately support a whole range of languages. The fold explorer is also able to detect the start and end line of a node. If you right click any item in the tree, it will select the corresponding source. So later it should be possible with drag and drop items in a tree to reorganise your code. (Like in Leo, but without comments.) Now it uses 'picasso', a random style colorizer. For more information read the this thread on the pyxides mailing list. (Join the mailing list!)

Does anyone know how with python I could dynamically retrieve if a language support folding? That is the last missing piece.

This screenshot shows how it parses its own python source:

Rob McMullen shows how it parses a C++ file:

Here is the source code if you want to try it out for yourself. You need to have wxPython installed to run it. It is a nice demo if you want to play around with scintilla on python. I am open to any improvements, remarks or feedback.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Today I switched on my laptop from wxPython2.6 to wxPython2.8 SPE seemed to work quite OK already, except: the bottom panel took too much place and was not draggable to a smaller size. After fixing this annoying bug, I am happily coding now with SPE on wxPython 2.8 For those who want to try out before I release, follow the subversion instructions. I tested the new SPE on Ubuntu (wxPython 2.6 & 2.8) and on Windows (wxPython 2.8). If anybody knows a good subversion client for the Mac, please comment.

sudo wxPython 2.8 has major new features such as AUI (Advanced User Interface), anti-alias graphics (Graphicscontext) and a lot of new widgets (RichTextCtrl, CustomTreeCtrl, SearchCtrl a la Firefox, ...). This might be useful for SPE in the future, but at the moment SPE stays backwards compatible with wxPython 2.6.

On Feisty wxPython is already included in repositories, just type:

sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8

On Edgy you need to use the wxPython coummunity repositories. Open /etc/apt/sources.list:

Monday, February 26, 2007

If you want to have the latest version of SPE, use subversion which is very easy. (Subversion is a way for multiple people around the world to work on the same program. It keeps the changes that they make to the source code of that program in sync with each other.) Do not forget first to uninstall your previous version of SPE! Windows users can uninstall SPE through 'Add/Remove programs' in the Control Panel (look for 'python-spe*', not for 'spe') and use a subversion client (tortoisesvn, rapidsvn) to get the latest SPE. Linux and mac users need just to copy and paste this in the terminal:

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/python/spe/trunk/_spe

This will create a '_spe' folder. (Do not rename it to 'spe' or another name!) From this folder you can run:

Saturday, February 24, 2007

I've switched from Windows to Ubuntu since half a year and I don't look back. I can recommend every python developer to do the same as the batteries included in Ubuntu are a python paradise. Of course I will continue supporting SPE on Windows and Mac as well. Watch out this blog as I will post here updates about SPE and some useful things about python, Ubuntu, UML, ...